Category: Garden

Skip number five left our property this week. It was a hardcore only load, so stone, brick, concrete, glass etc. only. This can be reused so the charge to take it away is a lot less than disposing of rubbish etc. Skip number four cost almost $1200 due to overloading with concrete etc., hence the switch. I’m not sure Tom from Kingston Rollsoff usually does hardcore only skips, so thanks for sorting this out Tom. We also sieved a good many tons of soil from the path we dug out, taking out any stone, glass, rubbish we could. Took a couple of weeks to do this but the soil is good and we will reuse it in the garden at some point.

After shifting this much soil I was hoping to find something interesting, but pretty much all we found was the other part of the gyroscope, a few bones and lots more bits of the clay pipe, for which I’ll do an artistic reconstruction. From the number of bits, “c’est un très gros tuyau”, which reads “it is a very large pipe”, probably…

This skip was a good opportunity to break out the jackhammer so I took away the concrete outside of the garage. I would have kept this concrete had the garage not been in a state of collapse. You can see the cracks in the pictures and it’s a lot worse when you see it for real with all the walls bowing out 4-6″. Eventually, we will rebuild the garage with maybe a flat roof so that can be used, maybe as a deck. We will also make the garage shorter and narrower.

We did add an extra 20% to the skip after the picture was taken, so I think we did a pretty good job.

To get the soil out of the way we stuck it in the garage with our cute little boat (a Zuma, made by Laser).

To be honest, so far Aimee and I have just scrapped the surface in terms of things that need to be accomplished. That said we have saved ourselves many thousands of dollars by doing this labour ourselves. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with a project of this size, so we always have a copy of “Hitch Hikers Guide” close at hand. DON’T PANIC.

[Show slideshow]

The back deck was gross and the first picture in the gallery pretty much shows how we found it, at least a foot of junk in some places (old plaster boards, kitchen units, roofing materials just rotting and compressing over the years).

The deck is now gone and will never be replaced with a deck. I see a deck as a cheap alternative to a beautiful stone patio which will always look great and never rot (note, I do see how a deck can make perfect sense when you want to get some height or on a slope etc.). Also, this deck was built directly onto bare earth so no wonder it rotted. If they had lifted it up a few inches, supported by concrete blocks, it probably would have been still okay today.

This area is rich with bluestone and as we know a good stone mason, we will eventually be making stone patios. This will be while off until we have the time, money and more importantly how we want the garden laid out. As it is we need to fill the skip and this is good fill 🙂

We are hoping to grade the garden such that the rear windows in the basement have as much light coming in as possible. It won’t be a lot but we can improve on what we currently have.

Going also are the finely crafted cement block walls, skillfully laided by Bodge Builders and Sons. In the UK these people are referred to as “Cowboys”. No disrespect meant to ranch Cowboys.

[UK informal] someone who is not honest, careful, or skilful in their trade or business, or someone who ignores rules that most people obey and is therefore not considered to be responsible:

Those builders are a bunch of cowboys – they made a terrible job of our extension.

I have a 3lb Estwing pound hammer and a Stanely concrete chisel which does take a long time, but you get there in the end. Oh yes, always wear safety glasses when doing this sort of work. I do also have a proper 10lb sledgehammer if needed and today arrived a 30mm x 1.5m monster of a crowbar. In the last picture in the gallery, you’ll see a huge concrete block. I want somehow to get this into the dumpster. It doesn’t look big but I doubt Aimee and I could lift it.

By the way, the walls are really at that angle.

[Show slideshow]

A month or so ago I was trying to find out what this tree was. Well, friends thought it was a sweet maple but the blossom didn’t match the red color, but that let me to the red maple (Acer Rubrum), which I’m pretty sure it is. Glad to find out as these trees are everywhere in Kingston and no one I spoke to knew what they were.

By the way the tree isn’t in our garden, but it does overhang a lot which will give us some lovely shade in the summer.

[Show slideshow]

Trying to cram in a much as possible into the skip. At $675 for this size, it’s not leaving with any space. This is the third skip we’ve had and will need another one next weekend. Contains a lot of the shrubbery we dug up as well as the clubhouse and an old rotting deck.

[Show slideshow]

How to vines get to the tops of trees when their first attachment to the tree is about thirty odd foot from the ground, it’s not as if they can jump? They definitely grow from the ground but with nothing to support their upward growth I’m puzzled.

[Show slideshow]